Auctions and Technical Information--Do Price and other guides help sell strong?

I was talking with one coin auction company that does not have prices guides, auction records or population figures on their auction site. The person said that they can actually work against realizing strong prices. How? Does it make the prospective buyer think they are being "coached" into buying at those levels, is it somehow condescending?

Personally, I find Heritage's exhaustive records extremely useful. They have not only current auction and older records but also population figures and Numismedia information.

Any thoughts on this issue?

 

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I think many people use price guides as a limit, having been trained that price guides are retail, so therefor is the absolute MOST you should spend on a coin. In auctions bidding wars can happen, and if everyone saw the price guide, they would stop sooner once it got above this figure.

Just my guess as to what they mean.

 

i got some land for sale down here in florida ,if you buy that !!!

 

But current auction records are the standard of what a coin is generally worth. Of course this does not apply if you can't match up a given coin with other coins that have sold recently. Truly rare or condition census coins, rare varieties, unusually toned coins, pedigreed rarities, etc..

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

IMO, it doesn't make any difference on the more rare stuff. The people who would be bidding towards the top already know all that info.
With lower end items it's useful because you will be getting people that are not especially knowledgeable about what they're bidding on.

 

...and there lies the problem with price guides. How do you handle the variability? Every coin is unique, and every sale of every coin is unique. There was a Judea Capta bronze at an auction earlier this year. These coins are not horribly rare, and examples in good or better condition as the auctioned piece sell regularly for $5,000-10,000. This piece was estimated at $5000, and sold for over $100,000. How do you put that in a price guide? What is another example of that coin worth, $5,000 or $100,000? All it takes is 2 bidders who HAVE to have a coin to make an auction go crazy. Knowing that, how much good are auction results? What most people do is throw out the top and bottom 25% of results to form a baseline, but there is still bias.

If there is enough data, doing this can help get a baseline, but everything still will boil down to a coin is what someone is willing to pay for it, what is it worth to you? Many people, though, skip this whole thought process and just rely on a price guide, and will buy a coin if under the guide price, but not buy it if over. In doing so they make sure they buy common coins not in the top conditions. knowledgable collectors will pay over price guides if the coin is a superlative example, as its worth it.

 

I have yet to get a coin price guide but from what I know I can only tell you the price guide is only a guide. Sometimes it sells for more than guide and sometimes it doesn't. There are too many factors to take into consideration how much a collectible really is, like time it sold, which collector is bidding and so on.
Also sometimes the market changes and thus the price guide becomes outdated since its been published yearly.

 

That's a great way of putting it. =)

I wouldn't exactly throw my price guides away, they are still useful for reference info aside from listed values.

I'm always surprised when I come across someone that either is not aware of, or simply does not use eBay's "completed items" button. This is very useful for pretty much all common, many scarce, and some rare coins.

For the more high end stuff, you can use http://www.coinarchives.com/ for world and ancient coins and Heritage archives http://coins.ha.com/common/search_results.php?N=51+790+231+&showHall=1 for pretty much all types.

The Heritage one requires a sign-up, but both are totally free with no gimmicks.

And if you can't find it there you can just google it. With foreign items it helps to type in the stuff written on the coin and the word "coin", "medal" , "token" or whatever applies in the language that corresponds to the item.

 

And don't forget www.cngcoins.com for ancients.

 

Great point. People can minimize that effect by looking for multiple records and seeing if the prices are consistent for the grade. If they are all over the place, like with Chinese coins, best to look elsewhere.
The unfortunate thing is that eBay completed items is the only way to see what most coins are selling for. Major auction records only have higher end stuff, but what about those $5 and $10 coins? They need some love too. =)

 

I find Heritage's auction the best for accessible information, but I hear that PCGS' subscription service to be excellent.

The problem with Heritage is that selling there, you have to have a large minimum consignment, you are dealing with a huge company so you probably are not going to get top notch service unless you are one of the big boys. Plus they wait longer to ship after payment than Teletrade; it is always possible that a supposed payment with a "credit card", etc. is bogus. So they have a longer hold period than some others before shipping because their bidding base is so large and international. If you figure in the 15% buyer's fee which really jacks up the cost of coins, it makes other venues attractive. I really liked Teletrade's 5.5% buyer premium but that is long gone.

 

I actually feel the same way about magazines and dealer sites as you do about eBay completed items. I start auctions at 99 cents, so retail prices don't mean very much to me.
When I see the same coin in the same grade that was sold with good pics and description by someone that is a consistent coin dealer, I usually rely on that expectation for my own coin (unless it's something I've got a strong customer base for). Sometimes my estimate ends up being too low, sometimes too high. But, it's a good starting point to figure out if the coin is worth listing individually or throwing into a larger lot and not wasting time with it.

Any particular reason you say you never use ebay as a value check, anymore? Let's get that personal story on here. =)

 

Sage advice, and it should be a sticky for new collectors. I know it would have saved me from some mistakes when I was cutting my teeth, albeit inexpensive ones. I think that auction history in conjunction with an up-to-date greysheet sets decent parameters when considering new purchases.

Case in point: I'm working on a 12 piece gold type set and found a nice example of a Liberty $2 1/2 for what seemed like a decent price when looking at the PCGS and Numismedia guides. It was around $200 less than listed in those two ($850 vs $1,060 and $1,080 respectively). But...on further examination, the latest realized HA auction prices were even lower, and greysheet bid/ask was right in line with the HA prices ($610 - $650). Amusingly enough I found that the exact coin I was looking at had been bought by the seller at an HA auction less than 2 weeks ago for $200+ less than the asking price including BP. My powder stayed dry. Was it a fair retail price? Probably. But for type coins I'm not looking to pay full retail when really nice examples can be had for much less.

Edited to add: to clarify, I'm referring to less esoteric coins when talking about using greysheet in conjunction with auction prices. For true rarities the auction prices are about all you have to go on, and even then there might not be much data available.

 

I came in on this thread late, and I'll admit that I didn't read every single post word-for-word, but I would be leery of any auction company which suggested that sales histories and populations were detrimental to realizing strong prices. A coin, any coin, is worth what it is worth, and I get the feeling that they would be afraid that posting such information would tend to keep the bidiots away.

Also, I agree with everything that Doug said.

Chris

 

I have been mentioning this for quiet a while. Coins going straight from Heritage to ebay. I have heard a lot of reasons why people don't buy on heritage - from prices to high to the old "they only sell higher grades than I buy". I do not know where people get this - I see coins on ebay all the time that are 20% higher than heritage and even higher than dealers. I know in some cases it is you just have to be patient to find the right coin at a dealer or heritage - where you can go and get one right off ebay. Not all coins are like this, but the ones I collect are. I don't mind sometimes a $10, $20 or even $30 higher on the bay to get the right coin - but sometimes it is worth the wait to save $200 or $300 on heritage.

I should quit recommending heritage. The bidding seems to keep getting tougher on some of the coins I collect. And I know on a few I am competing against dealers.